Bombay High Court: Allowing a petition filed by a prison inmate whose previous application for parole had been rejected, a Division Bench of the Court, comprising of V.K. Tahilramani and Sandeep K. Shinde, JJ., stated that the reasons as to why a parole application had been rejected, followed by rejection of the appeal, should be in consonance with each other and that they were entirely different which could not be acceptable.
The order of rejection of the parole application stated that the reason of rejection was Rule 4(3) of the Maharashtra Prisons (Bombay Furlough and Parole) Rules, 1959 a prisoner shall not be granted parole if he has been convicted under the Bomb Prohibition Act, 1949. However, the appellate order states that the rejection was under Rule 4(11) and (13) which had been inserted under the Maharashtra Prisons (Bombay Furlough and Parole) (Amendment) Rules, 2016 which state that a prisoner will not be granted a parole if his appeal in conviction is pending and if he had been sentenced for offences such as dacoity, terrorist crimes, mutiny against state, kidnapping for ransom, smuggling of narcotic or psychotropic substances, rape or rape with murder.
Since the reasons accorded for rejection were different in the two orders, the order was quashed and set aside. [Pandit Shankar Kalan v. State of Maharashtra, 2017 SCC OnLine Bom 6785, 26.07.2017]
